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Create ASTC Textures Faster With the New astcenc 2.0 Open Source Compression Tool
Peter Harris
Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is an advanced lossy texture compression format, developed by Arm and AMD and released as royalty-free open standard by the Khronos Group. It supports a wide range of 2D and 3D color formats with a flexible choice of bitrates, enabling content creators to compress almost any texture asset, using a level of compression appropriate to their quality and performance requirements.
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ASTC is increasingly becoming the texture compression format of choice for mobile 3D applications using the OpenGL ES and Vulkan APIs. ASTC’s high compression ratios are a perfect match for the mobile market that values smaller download sizes and optimized memory usage to improve energy efficiency and battery life.
astcenc 2.0
The ‘astcenc’ ASTC compression tool was first developed by Arm while ASTC was progressing through the Khronos standardization process seven years ago. astcenc has become widely used as the de facto reference encoder for ASTC, as it leverages all format features, including the full set of available block sizes and color profiles, to deliver high-quality encoded textures that are possible when effectively using ASTC’s flexible capabilities.
Today, Arm is delighted to announce astcenc 2.0! This is a major update which provides multiple significant improvements for middleware and content creators.
Compress 1 0 2 – Image Compression Tool Set
Apache 2.0 Open Source License
The original astcenc software was released under an Arm End User License Agreement. To make it easier for developers to use, adapt, and contribute to astcenc development, including integration of the compressor into application runtimes, Arm relicensed the astcenc 1.X source code on GitHub in January 2020 under the standard Apache 2.0 open source license.
The new astcenc 2.0 source code is now also available on GitHub under Apache 2.0.
Compression Performance
astcenc 1.X emphasized high image quality over fast compression speed. Some developers have told Arm they would love to use astcenc for its superior image quality, but compression was too slow to use in their tooling pipelines. The importance of this was reflected in the recent ASTC developer survey organized by Khronos where developer responses rated compression speed above image quality in the list of factors that determine texture format choices.
For version 2.0, Arm reviewed the heuristics and quality refinement passes used by the astcenc compressor—optimizing those that were adding value and removing those that simply didn’t justify their added runtime cost. In addition, hand-coded vectorized code was added to the most compute intensive sections of the codec, supporting SSE4.2 and AVX2 SIMD instruction sets.
Overall, these optimizations have resulted in up to 3x faster compression times when using AVX2, while typically losing less than 0.1 dB PSNR in image quality. A very worthwhile tradeoff for most developers.
astcenc 2.0 - Significantly Faster ASTC Encoding
Command Line Improvements
The tool now supports a clearer set of compression modes that directly map to ASTC format profiles exposed by the Khronos API support and API extensions.
Textures compressed using the LDR compression modes (linear or sRGB) will be compatible with all hardware implementing OpenGL ES 3.2, the OpenGL ES KHR_texture_compression_astc_ldr extension, or the Vulkan ASTC optional feature.
Textures compressed using the HDR compression mode will require hardware implementing an appropriate API extension, such as KHR_texture_compression_astc_hdr.
In addition, astcenc 2.0 now supports commonly requested input and output file formats:
- Loading LDR images in BMP, JPEG, PNG, and TGA formats
- Loading HDR images in OpenEXR and Radiance HDR formats
- Loading compressed textures in the “.astc” file format provided by astcenc, and the DDS and KTX container formats
- Storing LDR images into BMP, PNG, and TGA formats
- Storing HDR images into OpenEXR and Radiance HDR formats
- Storing compressed texturesinto the “.astc” file format provided by astcenc, and the DDS or KTX container formats
Core Codec Library
Finally, the core codec is now separable from the command line front-end logic, enabling the astcenc compressor to be integrated directly into applications as a library.
The core codec library interface API provides a programmatic mechanism to manage codec configuration, texture compression, and texture decompression. This API enables use of the core codec library to process data stored in memory buffers, leaving file management to the application. It supports parallel processing for compression of a single image with multiple threads or compressing multiple images in parallel.
Using astcenc 2.0
You can download astcenc 2.0 on GitHub today, with full source code and pre-built binaries available for Windows, macOS, and Linux hosts.
Free Image Compression Tool
For more information about using the tool, please refer to the project documentation:
- Getting started: learn about the high-level operation of the compressor.
- Format overview: learn about the ASTC data format and how the underlying encoding works.
- Efficient encoding: learn about using the command line to effectively compress textures, and the encoding and sampling needed to get functional equivalents to other texture formats that exist on the market today.
Arm have also published an ASTC guide, which gives an overview of the format and some of the available tools, including astcenc .
- Arm ASTC Guide: an overview of ASTC and available ASTC tools.
If you have any questions, feedback, or pull requests, please get in touch via the GitHub issue tracker or the Arm Mali developer community forums:
Khronos® and Vulkan® are registered trademarks, and ANARI™, WebGL™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenVX™, SPIR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, OpenVG™ and 3D Commerce™ are trademarks of The Khronos Group Inc. OpenXR™ is a trademark owned by The Khronos Group Inc. and is registered as a trademark in China, the European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom. OpenCL™ is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL® is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES™ and OpenGL SC™ logos are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.
What is Image Compression?
For someone who isn’t yet familiar with or understands the term image compression, it sounds like magic. However, once you go deeper into the subject, you get to know that how some images are larger in size, occupying more space than other despite regardless of the number of pixels they occupy on the screen. The image compression online is the procedure in which the size of an image or a graphics file is reduced.
It is naive to think that we can compress image only in just one way. There are many different methods, each having a distinct approach to compress image online. The key purpose of using an image compression software or image compression program is to achieve minimized redundancy and irrelevance in the image data.
To achieve image compression online or compress image online, any free image compression tool can be used. Fortunately, image compression software is easily and widely available on the internet now which you can use to compress image.
Compress Image Online: Image Size and Photo Compressor
The most basic measure of image size, as well as its dimensions in a browser, is the image resolution. Resolution can be determined by total pixels within in an image noted as width x height pixels. An image file size being the basic measure of its weight affects the download time. The interesting thing is that the two images of the same resolution are necessarily not always of the same file size.
Compress image online is one approach towards the difference in the image file size. Any offline or online image compressor or photo compressor can be used to compress image.
Why Use Compress Image Online Tool
Image compressor software isn’t just an additional and arbitrary step to take in the process of storing images or creating a website. You can compress image online for the web which will make it easier to transfer them or load quickly.
However, compression doesn’t mean making the images appear smaller on the page. In a real sense, compression requires you to cut down the cost of the storage space for images. If you own an image that is of insanely high quality, then it will take forever to load, especially with poor internet connection. Even resizing the image in a tiny little rectangle doesn’t ensure the compression of image file size.
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Thus, when you decide to upload a high quality or a large sized photo on the web, it is necessary to compress image, in addition, to visually size down it.
Compress Image Online: How Does It Work?
There are various ways to compress image online. It depends on why you to want to compress a picture in the first place and which kind of method you have decided to go for. Certificates templates for pages 1 0.
The method you decide to use is directly related to reducing the file size. By minimizing the size of a file, you encode the file data differently, or you reduce the information that is stored in the photo. The most convenient way is to use an image compression software to fulfill the requirement.
Luckily, gone are the days when it was nearly impossible to find a jpeg or png compression tool. We offer you the best image compression software which you can use freely to compress image online.
Lossy vs. Lossless Compression
Bettertouchtool 2 312 – customize multi touch trackpad gestures. Compression with the help of an image compression software is basically of two types: Lossy & Lossless image compression. Both these types of image compression online are self-explanatory enough. As the name suggests, lossy compression is the one which will compress image and cause it to lose a part of its quality while lossless compression doesn’t cause the image to lose its quality.
The lossless method enables you to keep the image quality intact while significantly reducing the file size and making it much easier to transfer. When you need to store the image in a type of archival system, you can use lossless compression method which allows you to retain every bit of information or quality, keeping the image crisp and detailed.
The lossy compression can be of use when you are using the images for a print publication or on a website. This method reduces the image size as well as some of its quality. It makes it easy and fast to load while making the photo look good without taking any unnecessary space.
Compress Image Online: Choosing a Right File Format
Different file formats are appropriate for different types of image files. It is very crucial to choose the proper image format. Choosing a right image format can result in smaller file sizes and higher image quality. Whether you want to compress JPEG or any other format, opting for the wrong format means the images won’t be as high in quality as they could be and the file size will likely be very large.
Online Compress Image: Size Reduction and Slow Devices
The decrease in the file size remains the single most significant advantage of using any image compressor or photo compressor. Depending on the type of file you are working with, you can compress image until it’s of your desired file size. You can compress JPEG, PNG, JPG or any image format with JPEG compression or other available tools. PNG or JPEG image compression would lead to less space taken by the image on the hard drive while retaining the same quality or physical size unless the image’s physical size is altered in an image editor. The file size reduction works great, allowing the webmasters to upload images without consuming much storage space or bandwidth.
Compression Tool Kit
Some of the electronic devices, such as cameras or computers, may take a lot of time to load huge, uncompressed images. For example, CD drives can only read the data at a particular rate, unable to display large images in real time. Also, for some web hosts that transfer data slowly, it becomes necessary to compress image online. Use of an image compressor to compress JPEG, JPG, PNG or any image file format also allow images to load quickly on other storage mediums, such as hard drives.
Image compression will allow the size reduction which will lead to faster loading of image data on slower devices.